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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:

Began a long and infamous career as a delinquent teenager, skipping school to assemble the center section of P-38 wings at Lockheed in Burbank California in 1942-3. Soon compelled by school officials to either return to school or join the armed forces, he chose the US Navy. As a wartime underwater sound man at Los Angeles harbor, he dispatched a successful aerial attack against a marauding California Gray Whale. The vanquished leviathan washed ashore the next day.

After the war, Taylor parlayed an interest in illegal street racing into a career as an automotive machinist in the burgeoning California speed shop industry. Driving a truck to make ends meet, his talents as a machinist lined the pockets of his employers until a lucky break in 1957 landed him a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. Here he found his calling at last, spending ten years in research, design and fabrication of the prototype Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (GCMS) for the Viking Mars Landers. The GCMS was the key instrument in Viking's search for life on Mars. During the course of this endeavor, Taylor set the Ultra High Vacuum record with an ion-pumped vacuum system, and co-invented a micro molecular leak used on flight instruments.

A Charter Member of the Smithsonian Air & Space Association, Taylor retired as an Associate Engineer after thirty-four years at JPL in 1991 to his home in Pasadena, where he and his wife of 47 years, Mildred, enjoy the gracious California lifestyle with their two dogs Becky and Rocky. Taylor generously offers unsolicited advice gleaned from his long career to anyone who will listen.